Netflix Quietly Perfected Their Pricing. Here’s What You Can Learn.

You know the story. Back in 2011, Netflix restructured their pricing in a big way. They unbundled streaming plans from the traditional DVD-by-mail business, increasing the price of the combined offering from $10 a month to $16 a month. And they rebranded their DVD-by-mail business to Qwikster.

The public reaction was staggeringly negative. Netflix lost a whopping 800,000 subscribers in Q3 2011. Their stock price plummeted immediately following their Q3 2011 earnings release. Over the course of four months, Netflix’s stock price dropped by almost 80% compared to July 2011. In the chart below, you can see the painful progression (courtesy of Yahoo! Finance).

When asked about the 2011 price change, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings said he wasn’t sure if the company had run customer focus groups before announcing the new plans. And, if they had run focus groups, he wasn’t sure what those focus groups had said. All of this uncertainty didn’t instill much confidence…

Fast forward to present day. In October of 2017, Netflix announced another pricing change. They raised the price of their core Standard plan from $9.99 per month to $10.99 per month. This change crossed a critical threshold in the minds of consumers and create a sizable gap in price between Netflix and Hulu Plus (which rings in at $7.99 a month).

With this new change, Netflix announced that existing customers would be automatically migrated into new plans – a move in stark contrast to a 2014 pricing change that grandfathered in existing customers, allowing them to keep lower prices for two years before being migrated to the newer, more expensive plans.

Given the company’s fraught history with pricing, I could not wait to hear how the 2017 pricing changes are impacting Netflix’s bottom line went. On Monday, January 22, Netflix announced the results in their Q4 2017 earnings.

By all measures, colossal success. Subscriber growth was not hurt by the pricing increase whatsoever. In fact, Netflix added 2 million new streaming subscribers in the US and 6.4 million overseas, 33% more than what Wall Street analysts had forecast. Both new and existing customers happily swallowed the price increase, which lifted Netflix’s revenue by 35% (faster than their 25% growth in average paid streaming memberships).

When asked about the impact of the price increase, CEO Reed Hastings told analysts, “We saw very little effect on sign ups and growth [from the price increase] and thus, the really strong results.” #Humblebrag.

With more subscribers, and with all subscribers now paying 10% more on average, Netflix saw a massive increase in profits. Operating income jumped to $245M, up from $154M the previous year. (Sidenote: Even very small pricing increases can have an outsized impact on a company’s profitability. You can read more about that here.)

You can guess what happened to Netflix’s stock price. It soared.

What you can learn from Netflix’s pricing strategy

There are a number of lessons SaaS companies should take away from Netflix’s successful pricing change, as well as from their epic 2011 fail. Here are my top five:

1. Pricing is critically important

How many business decisions can send your stock price spiraling down by 80% one year and then rocketing up another? The Netflix case proves that pricing changes can make or break a business, and therefore it’s important to invest in making the right pricing decisions. It also reinforces that even small changes in pricing can add up to major improvements in a company’s profitability.

2. Don’t let one mistake stop you from touching pricing again

After the Qwikster disaster of 2011, Netflix could have decided that they were never going to touch pricing again. They did, in fact, leave pricing alone until 2014. But over time, Netflix collected evidence that they had an opportunity to revisit pricing in a more thoughtful way. When they were ready to do so in 2014, Netflix took a conservative approach to mitigate the risk of another backlash. The success of their 2014 pricing change gave Netflix the confidence to take a more aggressive approach the next time around.

3. Pricing power comes down to value and customer satisfaction

In their Q4 2017 earnings call, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings was asked if he had plans for future price increases. His response perfectly summed up a value-based pricing philosophy. With a value-based approach, pricing power is an output that you can measure based on how much value you deliver to customers relative to alternatives on the market. It’s not a best guess, a snap decision, or an input based on a company’s cost structure.

“I think it’s a tricky thing because it really has to be a reflection of the underlying quality of the experience on a relative basis. So, as long as we’re able to continue to improve our content and our whole experience at a remarkable rate…then asking our customers to help us fund that at higher levels is reasonable. But if we weren’t gaining relative value for the customers, then we wouldn’t be changing prices.”

– Reed Hastings

4. Communicate pricing changes at the right time

One reason why Netflix’s pricing change went over so smoothly this time around was the timing. It coincided with the launch of amazing new original content, including new seasons of popular series like Stranger Things and The Crown (which I both highly recommend) and the debut of a big budget action film starring Will Smith (Bright). Other companies should similarly launch pricing increases when they can tie those increases back to improvements in customer value, for instance through new product launches, increases in NPS, new partnerships, or better analytics.

5. Present your customers with choices

Finally, customers respond better to pricing increases when they have options. And that’s true even if the options aren’t all that great. In Netflix’s case, while they increased the price of their Standard plan, they kept their entry-level Basic plan at $7.99 per month. A budget-conscious customer could by all means downgrade if they could not afford Netflix’s price increase. Doing so would mean giving up a lot – no more HD streaming and only 1 concurrent device. Still, having a choice makes the customer feel in control, and makes it easier for them to swallow a price increase.

What have you learned from Netflix’s pricing strategy? Let us know in the comments or tweet to @poyark or @OpenViewVenture.